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Never locked me in here.
The pain, the penance was my own.
His meaning very clear.
We both knew exactly what I’d done. How I should be punished for it.
That is, if he wasn’t lying about these shackles being locked. I’d been too chicken shit to lift my arms yet to test the truth of his statement.
Because, honestly, I should still be suffering.
I took Venetia from him—betrayed him in the worst possible way. No matter that I thought he was going to turn me over to Cletus. No matter that he had allowed Cletus, the man that had tortured his daughter, into Netherstone. No matter the atrocities I thought him capable of at the end.
I stole his daughter away from him.
This pain he had let me sit in was just. I accepted it because I understood what he was feeling. Venetia had become my own daughter during these last four years, and the very thought of someone taking her away from me made me want to murder the world.
Damen broke too early. Too easily.
I deserved more.
Weeks of the pain, at the very least.
Cletus appearing and taking me away to his lab, at the most.
The thought of Cletus showing up here at the castle sent a raw shiver outward from my belly to tremble into my limbs.
I didn’t know if Damen’s brother had survived the castle collapsing into the valley below. I could only assume Cletus had, because he was the one person that had survived my bomb of destruction years ago in that German’s manor house.
How he’d survived—other than he was a fucking cockroach—I was never quite sure.
Had he made it into another room in the cellar, protected from death by a layer of stone? I never had looked in the other cells as I’d staggered out of the manor. Had he hid under the table I was on top of and my rain of death only spread outward and upward? Again, I hadn’t searched around, I was in such a stupor.
But he’d survived when I had detonated and had killed everyone else in the vicinity of that manor house.
I had no doubt Cletus was still alive. Somehow. Somewhere. Even if I hadn’t heard a word of who had survived the collapse of the Netherstone. My communication with Uncle Triaten had been cut off, as he couldn’t know where I was hiding. And he was my main source of information of the panthenite-malefic worlds.
Hell, maybe Cletus was waiting for me upstairs. Maybe this was an elaborate set-up by Damen to punish me even more.
That was the cruelest part about all of this.
Anything I thought I knew about Damen and his world was gone. How he thought, what he wanted. All of it had disintegrated the second this castle had fallen into the valley below.
But I could only lie here, wallowing for so long.
Time to move my damn arms.
Chains clinking, my hands flattened onto the cold damp stone and I pushed myself upright, sitting, and I set my left hand into my lap. I twisted the heavy iron shackle around my wrist, my fingers fumbling with the lock threaded through the loop of the shackle. It instantly twisted open.
Well…shit.
Onto my right arm. The lock fell right open. Bending my knees upward, I checked the shackles around my ankles.
All the locks swung open with the slightest nudge.
The door to the chamber was wide open.
Freedom.
